Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Operations Support Manager

🎯 Role Definition

The Operations Support Manager leads day-to-day operational support functions to ensure reliable, high-quality service delivery. This role owns incident and escalation management, continuous improvement of operational processes, SLA performance, and cross-functional coordination with IT, engineering, product, and third-party vendors. The ideal candidate blends technical understanding (ticketing systems, monitoring, basic scripting, data analysis) with strong people leadership and service delivery skills (ITIL, change management, vendor governance) to reduce operational risk, improve mean time to resolution (MTTR), and drive measurable operational KPIs.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Senior Technical Support Lead
IT Service Desk Team Lead
Operations Analyst / Process Improvement Specialist

Advancement To:

Head of Operations Support / Director of Service Delivery
Senior Manager, IT Operations
VP of Customer Experience or Global Service Operations

Lateral Moves:

Program Manager, Cross-Functional Operations
Vendor/Partner Operations Manager
Service Reliability / Site Reliability Engineer (manager track)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Own day-to-day service delivery and operational excellence for platform and application support, ensuring adherence to SLAs, OLAs, and customer expectations across internal and external stakeholders.
Lead the incident management lifecycle: triage, communication, escalation, coordination of cross-functional response teams, and maintain clear incident records until full resolution and closure.
Develop and drive a robust escalation management framework, including clear escalation paths, on-call rotations, runbooks, and post-incident follow-up responsibilities.
Establish and monitor key operational KPIs (MTTR, MTTA, SLA compliance, ticket backlog, first contact resolution) and deliver weekly/monthly performance reports to senior leadership.
Manage, coach, and scale a team of operations engineers, support analysts, and coordinators — including hiring, performance development, 1:1s, career planning, and capacity forecasting.
Implement and maintain ITIL-aligned processes (incident, problem, change, release, service request) to improve predictability, reduce risk, and standardize service delivery.
Own vendor and third-party supplier relationships for operational services, negotiating SLAs, managing escalations, conducting regular business reviews, and enforcing contractual commitments.
Lead root cause analysis (RCA) and problem management efforts to identify systemic issues and drive corrective actions that reduce repeat incidents and improve system reliability.
Partner with engineering, product, and infrastructure teams to validate service-level objectives, coordinate releases and deployments, and minimize operational impact during changes.
Manage change control and release coordination — review change requests for operational readiness, runbook completion, rollback plans, and communication plans.
Build, maintain, and publish runbooks, playbooks, SOPs, and knowledge base articles that enable consistent service delivery and faster onboarding of new team members.
Drive continuous improvement initiatives using Lean, Kaizen, or Six Sigma principles to streamline ticket workflows, reduce escalations, and lower operational costs.
Own and evolve the monitoring, alerting, and observability strategy — tune alert thresholds, reduce noise, and ensure alerts map to actionable runbooks and owner assignments.
Oversee capacity planning and resource allocation for support teams and platform components to ensure appropriate staffing during peak periods and planned business growth.
Coordinate cross-functional incident communications and stakeholder updates, producing executive-level incident summaries and actionable post-mortems for leadership and customers.
Maintain the service catalog and defined service levels for internal and external customers, ensuring clarity on responsibilities, response times, and support scope.
Drive automation opportunities to reduce manual toil (scripted remediation, self-healing workflows, ticket automation) in partnership with SRE/engineering teams.
Ensure compliance with security and regulatory requirements in operations activities, collaborating with security and audit teams on incident handling and remediation.
Implement and run quality assurance for support interactions (ticket reviews, call monitoring, feedback loops) to maintain high customer satisfaction (CSAT) and NPS scores.
Manage budgets and operational expenditures related to support tooling, vendor contracts, and people costs, recommending optimizations where appropriate.
Lead onboarding, training, and continuous learning programs for the operations support organization to raise technical competency and customer-facing skills.
Facilitate service transition activities for new product launches and platform upgrades, including runbook handover, knowledge transfer sessions, and readiness checks.
Drive cross-team projects that reduce incident surface area, improve user experience, and increase resiliency — track project deliverables, timelines, and outcomes.
Coordinate disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity planning for supported services, run regular DR exercises, and maintain recovery playbooks.
Act as a customer-facing escalation contact for high-impact incidents, maintaining calm, clarity, and credibility while setting expectations and delivering on commitments.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
Maintain and update service documentation, knowledge base articles, and onboarding materials to reduce time-to-productivity for new hires.
Assist product and engineering teams in operational readiness reviews prior to major launches.
Participate in vendor selection and procurement activities by assessing operational fit, SLAs, and runbook requirements.
Support continuous improvement initiatives by recommending tooling upgrades and workflow automation that reduce manual intervention.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Incident Management & Escalation — proven experience leading high-severity incident response and post-incident RCA.
ITIL Foundation / Service Management — familiarity with incident, problem, change, and release processes and best practices.
Ticketing Systems — hands-on with ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, Zendesk, or similar platforms for queue management and reporting.
Monitoring & Observability — experience with Datadog, New Relic, Splunk, Prometheus/Grafana, or CloudWatch for alerting and diagnostics.
Scripting & Automation — practical knowledge of Python, Bash, PowerShell, or automation tools (Ansible, Terraform, Rundeck) to automate operational tasks.
Data Analysis & Reporting — advanced Excel, SQL query skills, and experience building dashboards in Looker, Tableau, Power BI, or Grafana for operational KPIs.
Change Management — ability to assess risk, coordinate approvals, and execute non-disruptive change windows.
Vendor & Contract Management — negotiating SLAs, managing escalations, and conducting vendor/business reviews.
Cloud & Infrastructure Fundamentals — working knowledge of AWS, Azure, or GCP concepts relevant to platform availability and incident impact.
Root Cause Analysis Tools & Methodologies — 5 Whys, Fishbone, or more formal RCA techniques to diagnose systemic issues.
Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery — planning and executing DR exercises and maintaining recovery playbooks.
Security & Compliance Awareness — knowledge of security incident handling, access controls, and regulatory obligations impacting operations.

Soft Skills

Leadership & Team Development — proven ability to hire, mentor, and grow a high-performing operations team.
Communication & Stakeholder Management — clear written and verbal communication with executives, engineers, customers, and vendors.
Problem Solving & Critical Thinking — pragmatic, analytical approach to resolving ambiguous operational problems under pressure.
Customer Focus — strong orientation toward customer satisfaction, empathy, and service quality.
Prioritization & Time Management — ability to manage competing priorities across incidents, projects, and operational tasks.
Resilience & Calm Under Pressure — maintains focus during outages and major incidents, leading teams through resolution.
Collaboration & Influencing — works cross-functionally to gain alignment and drive changes without direct authority.
Continuous Improvement Mindset — proactive about identifying inefficiencies and driving measurable process improvements.
Attention to Detail — meticulous documentation and follow-through on action items and compliance activities.
Coaching & Feedback — delivers constructive feedback and creates development plans to upskill the operations workforce.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering, or related field — or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in a technical or business discipline.
Certifications such as ITIL Foundation, PMP, Lean Six Sigma, or relevant cloud certifications (AWS, Azure, GCP).

Relevant Fields of Study:

Information Technology / Computer Science
Business Administration / Operations Management
Engineering (Industrial, Systems, Software)
Data Analytics / Information Systems

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 5–10+ years in technical operations, service delivery, or IT support roles with at least 2–3 years in a management or team lead capacity.

Preferred:

Proven record managing 10+ direct or indirect reports in a 24x7 or global support organization.
Experience with high-availability SaaS platforms or large-scale IT infrastructures.
Demonstrated success reducing MTTR, improving SLA compliance, and implementing automation to reduce manual toil.
Hands-on experience with incident response, vendor management, change control, and operational reporting.